THE CHALLENGE
A person’s microbiome can have major impacts on their personal health. Everything from the function of your heart to your GI tract have all been tied to the unique set of bacteria, fungi, viruses and their genes, and their effects from living in and on our bodies.
But there hasn’t been a reliable way to control one’s microbiome to improve your health. Hertz Fellow Cheri Ackerman is changing that.
THE SOLUTION
Ackerman is the co-founder and CEO of Concerto Biosciences, which is working to harness information about biomes, and interactions of thousands of key pieces of it, to create ways to improve our lives.
They do so through their screening apparatus kChip, which has 43,000 micro-sized wells, each of which acts as a tiny test tube, to screen for useful ensembles of microbes 10 times faster than previous technologies; and through kAI, Concerto’s machine learning engine.
One such application of these technologies has been the Skin Universe Project (SUP), the largest empirically measured microbe interaction dataset in the world. To get there, the company collected more than 33 million data points using the kChip platform. At peak, the platform constructed and assessed over 1.4 million combinations in a single day.
Concerto is using the dataset to train an AI model of microbial ecology and to design targeted dermatology and skincare products.
THE IMPACT
So far, the Skin Universe Project dataset has found a potential microbial therapy for atopic dermatitis (more commonly called eczema), which is currently in clinical trials. It has also identified which bacteria could be harmful or hurtful to wound healing, and the starting points for designing safer, more effective acne products.
“The Skin Universe Project positions Concerto to build a robust pipeline of live biotherapeutics and natural skin solutions,” said Ackerman. While the focus has been on dermatology, microbial solutions are also being explored for issues in women’s health, and food science.
